Standing close to the canvas, my eyes could detect nothing but a confused daub, but on receding gradually from it the effect was curious, not to say startling. The features of Cæsar, which appeared but dim and vague at first, became gradually clearer and more distinct, till at length each curve and every line of the painted countenance stood out in relief through the cascade of yellow beams. I could quite forgive the little servant-girl for supposing that the eyes of this figure moved, for more than once I was seized with the same impression. The thought, suggested by the epitaph in the artist's portfolio, that a murdered man might have contributed to the deathlike realism displayed by this face invested it with a weird interest; and I continued to gaze at it as though it were the embalmed head of Orpheus, celebrated in classic legend, whose dead tongue could whisper things past and to come. The filmy, glazed eyes fascinated me with their dreadful stare. The face had a mournful, surprised expression--the very expression, so far as I could imagine (for happily I am no judge of such matters), of a man who, without warning, had been cut off out of the land of the living. It was not, however, the face that meets us in the coins and busts of art-galleries: it seemed to have a much more familiar look. It seemed a face well known to me--one, too, that I had seen but recently. Minute after minute passed, and still I stood there contemplating the dead face, with the secret consciousness that ere long I should recognise it. A sudden movement on my part to the left, seemingly, as it were, to set the face in a new point of view, caused the light of knowledge to flash into my mind. A loud cry broke from me, and I reeled back into the middle of the hall. For my brother's face was staring at me from the canvas in lineaments not to be mistaken--in lineaments so startling in their fidelity to the original that I marvelled how I could have failed at the first to detect the resemblance. The beard and hair were wanting to complete the likeness: it was this omission that had delayed my recognition of it, just as it had prevented my recognition of the portrait sketch that Angelo had exhibited to me. Overwhelmed with amazement I stood staring at the picture, rooted to the spot, without power to move from it. Whence had Angelo derived the marvellous art that had enabled him to limn my brother's face so faithfully, and yet to transform it so as to make it seem like the very image of death?